Daily Archives: June 25, 2019

By Bertrand Badré – In 2015, the international community launched a renewed effort to tackle collective global challenges under the auspices of the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda and the Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP21). But after an initial flurry of interest, the progress that has been made toward achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and tackling climate change has tapered off. Around the world, many seem to have developed an allergy to increasingly stark warnings from the UN and other bodies about accelerating species extinctions, ecosystem collapse, and global warming.

Now is not the time to debate whether progress toward global goals is a matter of the glass being half-full or half-empty. Soon, there will no longer even be a glass to worry about. Despite global news coverage of civic and political action to address our mounting crises, the underlying trends are extremely frightening.

For decades, most of the major economies have relied on a form of capitalism that delivered considerable benefits. But we are now witnessing the implications of the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman’s famous mantra: “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”

A capitalist system that is disconnected from most people and unmoored from the territories in which it operates is no longer acceptable. Systems do not work in isolation. Eventually, reality asserts itself: global trade tensions reemerge, populist nationalists win power, and natural disasters grow in frequency and intensity.

Simply put, our approach to capitalism has exacerbated previously manageable social and environmental problems and sowed deep social divisions. The explosion in inequality and the laser focus on short-term results (that is, quarterly earnings) are just two symptoms of a broken system. more>

Who’s at fault for student-loan defaults?By Howard R. Gold – A central driver of growing income inequality in recent decades has been the earnings premium commanded by those with technical skills, and a widening gap between college graduates and those with a high-school diploma or less.

Workers in the United States have responded by seeking college courses to improve their skills, and many have been drawn to for-profit institutions, which offer two- or four-year degrees or professional certificates in fields such as health administration, culinary arts, and cosmetology. But rather than enjoying an income boost, many graduates of for-profit schools have found themselves struggling to pay back student loans, and defaulting on their debts.

Nontraditional students tend to be older than 25 and often they are the first in their families to attend college. They tend to have lower family incomes than typical college students. They are disproportionately women and single parents. They are more likely to be Hispanic or African American.

To be sure, college tuition rose almost 360 percent between 1985 and 2015, and graduates of professional schools, which boast some of the highest tuition rates, tend to owe the most. The median student debt of a new medical-school graduate was $190,000 in 2017, as reported by the Association of American Medical Colleges, while the average debt for graduates of US business schools was $70,000, according to the consumer-finance site SoFi.com, which derived the figure from 60,000 student-loan refinancing applications submitted between January 2014 and September 2016. more>

Trouble-to-Resolve: Assure Layer 3 Service Performance in MinutesBy Don Jacob – Service provider networks have come a long way from the flat networks of yesteryear. Today, they are highly complex with multiple hierarchies and layers, while running a plethora of services and technologies. Providers use the same underlying network to cater to different applications, ranging from financial applications to streaming video, each with its own unique performance and fault-tolerance requirements.

In this complex scenario, how can service providers assure performance of their Layer 3 services, to verify that services are being delivered and ensure customer satisfaction? Take the case of a service provider who’s providing MPLS services to hundreds of customers. Let us look at how the network engineer managing a service provider network handles a routing issue without a routing analytics solution.

Today, when a customer raises a ticket for a reachability or service delivery problem, the provider manually analyzes the issue, making their trouble-to-resolve process long and time consuming.

To start with, if the customer raises the trouble ticket while a connectivity issue is in progress, the first thing the provider needs to know is the routing path taken by the service. This requires the network engineer finding the source router and then running a traceroute from that router to determine all the hops along the path. Once the routers along the path have been identified, they would then log into each router to understand its performance.

This process is repeated on all routers along the path until the problematic router or link is identified. more>

And How It Hurt AmericaBy Dani Rodrik – Globalization is in trouble. A populist backlash, personified by U.S. President Donald Trump, is in full swing. A simmering trade war between China and the United States could easily boil over. Countries across Europe are shutting their borders to immigrants. Even globalization’s biggest boosters now concede that it has produced lopsided benefits and that something will have to change.

Today’s woes have their roots in the 1990s, when policymakers set the world on its current, hyperglobalist path, requiring domestic economies to be put in the service of the world economy instead of the other way around. In trade, the transformation was signaled by the creation of the World Trade Organization, in 1995. The WTO not only made it harder for countries to shield themselves from international competition but also reached into policy areas that international trade rules had not previously touched: agriculture, services, intellectual property, industrial policy, and health and sanitary regulations. Even more ambitious regional trade deals, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, took off around the same time.

In finance, the change was marked by a fundamental shift in governments’ attitudes away from managing capital flows and toward liberalization. Pushed by the United States and global organizations such as the International Monetary Fund and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, countries freed up vast quantities of short-term finance to slosh across borders in search of higher returns. more>